Neil Postman’s Vision of Humane Education

By |2021-04-24T08:09:06-05:00April 23rd, 2021|Categories: Education, Information Age, Liberal Learning, Neil Postman, Technology|

Whether it be in the context of public schools, private schools, home-centered education, co-ops, or learning pods, revisiting Neil Postman’s vision will help foster humane education in our Zoom World. It was nearly sixty years ago when famed media theorist Marshall McLuhan penned The Gutenburg Galaxy as “a series of historical observations” regarding the cultural [...]

Ideas Have Consequences

By |2014-06-30T00:39:33-05:00June 28th, 2014|Categories: Books, Neil Postman, Progressivism, Richard Weaver|

Richard Weaver introduces Ideas Have Consequences (1948) by explaining that at the root of “the dissolution of the West” is modern man’s denial of universal truth and his progressive assumption that “the most advanced point in time represents the point of highest development.” Enlightenment thought attacked transcendental truth via the battering rams of nominalism, empiricism, [...]

Culture and Colossus

By |2014-06-17T08:36:30-05:00June 16th, 2014|Categories: Books, Modernity, Neil Postman, Technology|Tags: |

Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century by O. B. Hardison Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman The polarities of boundlessness and limits have helped to define the human experience. Although men and women have always lived with infinite longings, at one time they could not avoid [...]

Informing Ourselves to Death

By |2018-08-13T10:15:44-05:00May 16th, 2014|Categories: Culture, Information Age, Intelligence, Neil Postman, Technology|

The great English playwright and social philosopher George Bernard Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the common folk. He meant that those who belong to elite trades—physicians, lawyers, teachers, and scientists—protect their special status by creating vocabularies that are incomprehensible to the general public. This process prevents outsiders from understanding what the [...]

1984 or Brave New World?

By |2017-02-03T11:10:11-06:00May 12th, 2014|Categories: Aldous Huxley, Books, George Orwell, Neil Postman|

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy did not, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares. But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark [...]

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